


Renaissance Art

by IdrisEleven



Category: Da Vinci's Demons
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Museums, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-09-07
Packaged: 2018-04-19 15:20:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4751219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IdrisEleven/pseuds/IdrisEleven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She noticed him the first time he joined one of her tours. Well, who wouldn’t, he was extremely handsome, and the dark-eyed bearded type that had always been her weakness. He was well dressed, in sober black, and he didn’t look like an art school type; no visible tattoos or piercings. His long black bangs fell over large brown eyes, and his face was just so mobile, never resting in a single expression, but shifting as if his thoughts just showed on his face. She found it hard to look away. He was just arresting."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Renaissance Art

She noticed him the first time he joined one of her tours. Well, who wouldn’t, he was extremely handsome, and the dark-eyed bearded type that had always been her weakness. He was well dressed, in sober black, and he didn’t look like an art school type; no visible tattoos or piercings. His long black bangs fell over large brown eyes, and his face was just so mobile, never resting in a single expression, but shifting as if his thoughts just showed on his face. She found it hard to look away. He was just arresting.

“So, there’s this guy. . . .” She was back in the staff room with a mug of chai. Olive was already sitting at a table with her coffee, dumping sugar into it at an impressive rate. She looked up, her dark eyes sparkling.

“There’s a guy?” She offered her fist, and Zita bumped it, but only because it would have been awkward not to. “You go get it, honey. You’ve been through enough, time for something for yourself.”

“No, it’s not like that.” Zita sat down, let the steam from her drink drift up to her nostrils, inhaled the vanilla and spices scent. It wasn’t particularly good chai, it had come from a tea bag after all, but it reminded her of home anyway. “He’s this guy, and he comes every Sunday and takes my tour.”

Olive’s expression changes to concern. “Oh honey, is he a creeper? Do you feel safe? We can get one of the security guards to go with you.”

“It’s okay, Olive, really. He’s not like that either. He’s just, well, he’s so serious. He comes every week, he stays for the whole thing, and he’s got these eyes.” She brought her hands up to her face and opened them, miming the way that man’s eyes looked so huge in his face. Olive snickered.

“And he looks at everything, really hard and focused, like he’s memorizing for the test he expects at the end. But he never says anything, and he always stays at the back, and any time I look at him, he starts looking somewhere else like he’s avoiding eye contact.” She sighed. “I don’t understand what is going on and I’m starting to obsess about it.”

With a solid clink, Olive set down her coffee and picked up one of Zita’s hands. “Okay, quick questions, and you have to answer me honestly. Does he feel dangerous? Does he make your Spidey sense tingle?”

That took a moment of thought. “Oh, no, not dangerous. This isn’t a case for alerting security or anything. There’s something there, but it’s not danger.”

“Okay, does he seem unhappy? Angry? Upset at all?”

“Noooo.” The word was drawn out, hesitant. “I mean, he’s got this look, like he’s just generally melancholy. Like a puppy who has only had a terrible and abusive owner and doesn’t know anything else but also doesn’t expect much?” It was those eyes, she would swear it, that made her want to reach out to him. “So he looks unhappy, but like he’s used to it and thinks that normal. Not like he’s unhappy and enraged about it.”

At that, Olive gave her such a look. “Oh, it’s like that, is it? How old is he?”

“I don’t know, mid-thirties maybe?”

“Well dressed, well groomed?”

“Absolutely.” 

This got her a reprise of That Look. “Attractive?”

“Yes?” The expression on Olive’s face didn’t change an iota. “Not like that! That’s not what this is about.”

Olive just twisted her mouth. It was a skill she had, a particular expression that was both skeptical and humor filled at the same time. Zita felt like she’d just been outed, but wasn’t entirely sure what she had been outed about. “Yeah, honey, you keep telling yourself that if you have to.” And with that, her smile turned sincere and she patted Zita’s hand brusquely. 

“Tell you what. I’ll join your tour next week, and be an unbiased observer. See if we can figure something out. If he is a creeper, I’ll talk to security. If he’s not a creeper, then he’ll have to pass the Olive Test for Potential Boyfriends. He’s got to be good enough for you, sweetie.”

*****

The next week, Olive was already in the staff room when Zita came in, closed the door, and leaned up against it. “Give it to me straight, doc. Creeper or not creeper?”

“I gotta say, he’s a hard read.” Olive watched as Zita made tea, pulling a small zippered plastic bag from overhead that she tipped into the hot water with a tea bag. “I see what you mean about—wait, what is that?”

Zita looked over, then down at the bag in her hand. “Oh, I thought I’d try to add some real spices, make this pathetic excuse for a chai something a little closer to the real thing.” She picked up her mug and sat at the small table. “It needs to actually brew or something, but it’s got to be better than not adding anything.” She looked down at the detritus floating on the surface of her tea. “That’s the theory anyway.”

It was a brave gesture, and Olive wondered if Zita was having trouble adjusting to being so far from home; she had said she was born in Africa. Minnesota winters had to be a huge adjustment for someone not born into them.

“But you were saying?”

“Oh right. Yes, I saw what you meant about him looking away. I mean, he watched you, but it wasn’t intense or anything. Not like he was stalking you. He looked like everybody else in the group, paying attention to you.” She thought for a moment. “Well, not quite like everybody else; he didn’t get distracted like they did. And nobody else looked away from you like he did. Every. Single. Time.”

That was a relief. Zita was afraid she’d been imagining that.

“But, Zita honey, when he looked away? He got this blush on the back of his neck.”

She could feel the grin spread itself across her face. “He blushes, does he? Well. A blush, I can work with that.”

*****  
The signs went up in several visible places; it hadn’t been hard to convince the museum director, since the signage was quite literally the only expenditure involved. Low risk meant the cost-benefit analysis was easy. Any benefit was worth no cost.

So Zita revised the tours. More accurately, she developed four new tours to be given over what they museum was calling “The Month of Sundays: New Looks at the Permanent Collection.” The tours she had been giving had been the same for years. Decades probably. There were some seasonal differences, especially in the period rooms, when they were decorated for holidays, but for the most part the tours tended to focus on a few items that had been considered the highlights of the collection, and mostly limited to a single geographic area or time period: “European paintings of the 18th century” or “Aboriginal art of the Pacific Islanders.”

For these tours, Zita decided to take on themes in order to tie together different media, different historical eras, different cultures. They weren’t subtle, the themes; she’d chosen War, Peace, Hate, and Love. The pleasure and challenge was in how diverse she could make the elements of the tour, what under-appreciated pieces she could showcase. The curator side of her was meticulous about making the tours valuable to all the museum’s audiences. The non-curator side was hoping Her Guy would like them, most of all.

That had nearly been as difficult a mental task as developing four entirely new tours: how to refer to her mysterious non-creeper. In the weeks it took to develop the new tours, Olive had “just happened” to intercept Zita’s tours each Sunday, already present in a gallery as they entered, coming in as they left, and once more actually taking the tour for its entirety. Each Sunday they met afterwards in the staff room and compared their impressions. One of the early ones had been devoted to creating an acceptable designation.

“We have to call him something,” Olive insisted. “We can’t just refer to him as ‘Not Creepy.’”

“You have a point,” Zita agreed. “What have we been calling him?”

Silence fell for a few moments, as Olive tried to remember. “I think we’ve just been calling him ‘Him.’ Which isn’t very specific.” She sipped her coffee, musing. “I’m sure we can do better than that.”

Zita smiled. “Glad we aren’t setting the bar too high here.” The trouble was that they didn’t know much about him other than what he looked like, his earnest attentiveness, and his determined self-effacement. “He doesn’t ask questions, and he doesn’t call attention to himself at all.”

Olive gave her some serious side eye. “Well, you certainly noticed him pretty quickly.”

“Olive, he’s like half a century younger than anybody who take that tour who isn’t also a parent.” Zita rolled her eyes. “He’s hard to miss that way.”

“So we won’t call him ‘The Invisible Man.’ ‘Mr. Self-Effacement’ is a non-starter.” 

Thank god for that, Zita thought. And then said it aloud, because Olive needed to hear it.

“Fine, but I don’t hear you making any suggestions.” The aggrieved tone was obviously put on, and when Zita smiled, Olive smiled back. “Okay, he’s got those huge brown puppy dog eyes, which kind of work against the emo thing he might have going, what with the black clothes and the beard and the bangs. . .We could call him ‘Bangs.’ Then I could sing that Ricky Martin song at you whenever I wanted to annoy you.” She began bouncing in her seat, her hands above her head as she sang quietly. “He bangs, he bangs, oh baby when he moves, he moves, I go crazy….”

“That is enough of that,” Zita’s tone was severe, and Olive pouted.

“That was some high quality butt dancing you just interrupted.”

“There will be no ‘Bangs’ nicknames. I believe I have veto power here, and I have just exercised it.” She added, “No offense to Ricky Martin intended.”

*****

Olive had her own obligations, of course, and couldn’t possibly spend hours every Sunday on Zita’s tours. But Vanessa could. Vanessa was a college student who volunteered at the museum on weekends, and she was visibly excited about the new tours.

“I love this, you know, I really do. I mean, obviously, somebody puts together the tours but somehow I just never really thought about it. They just sort of seem like they just come out of nowhere, you know? Like folk tales or something, they are just passed down from generation to generation.” She smiled, and her blue eyes sparkled. “It’s like, suddenly seeing that writing all those papers for my art history classes has a point. Like it’s an actual skill I could use in the real world.”

She was young, Zita thought, younger than I was when I was that age even. But she was smart, she was enthusiastic, and she wanted to participate in Zita’s rehearsal runs as well as the actual Sunday tours. “I can be your practice audience, and then since I’ve already been through once, I can watch the people on the tour and see what they like.” Olive sent a significant look at Zita at that comment.

“It might be useful to have you come this Sunday before we start the new ones, if you are available.”

“Oh, cool, like a control sample or something. Sure.” So the last of the “regular” Sundays, Vanessa joined the tour, hanging back so she wasn’t obstructing anyone else’s view of the art. Which meant that she ended up standing near The Guy, her bright red curls contrasting with his black hair, and Zita found herself looking that direction more than she meant to. 

It wasn’t jealousy, she told herself sternly, it was curiosity. Were they talking together? That was fine, it was more than fine, it was the job they had given Vanessa and she was doing her job and it was fine if The Guy talked to her, that would just be more data points that she could use. 

So, stop looking over there, and just do your job like Vanessa is doing hers. Really, it was time for some new tours, because she was still talking about religious iconography in a medieval altarpiece with the tiny part of her brain that wasn’t taken up with this stupid fixation on Vanessa standing next to Her Guy. But he isn’t Your Guy, she told herself, he is only The Guy, and you don’t even know his name.

“The use of the gold background served two purposes,” she could feel herself saying, without having to think about it consciously. “It demonstrated the wealth of the patron or the church itself, this use of precious materials showed they could afford to use currency as decoration. But it had a spiritual aspect as well, as it represented the infinite value of the heavenly realm.” Smooth, practiced, the next transition to Renaissance religious art, and as she turned to lead the group into the next gallery, she couldn’t keep from looking at Vanessa and The Guy. Vanessa was grinning at her, literally giving her a thumbs up sign, and The Guy—

The Guy was looking at her and smiling.

*****

Back in the staff room, Vanessa was ebullient. “So, who’s your biggest fan? I swear he never took his eyes off of you. Which is so hot--he is so into you.” 

Zita appreciated the enthusiasm, but it was also rather embarrassing. Her death glare needed some work, apparently, because Vanessa kept burbling on. “And then he looked at you, at that altarpiece, and he has dimples! Dimples are my kryptonite!”

Olive came in, just in time to hear the last comment. “Who has dimples?”

Vanessa’s smile became even larger. “Oh, you know, Tall Dark and Mysterious, the guy with the obvious crush who was in Zita’s tour group today. There was this point where she looked over and he smiled at her and oh. My. God. The dimples.”

Zita flushed, because she had seen them herself, and was embarrassed by how much she had liked them. Her embarrassment was made worse when Olive declared, “That’s it! We’re calling him ‘Dimples!’”

Honestly, it was enough to make a woman go learn a guy’s name.


End file.
